Holy crap, ABC is going to air a show about a badass woman written by female writers.

Will it be good? I hope so. Better chance of it than some boring sitcom, anyway.

Will be watching.

This is a good, snarky piece but it is also completely wrong over the long term about robotics and other automation technology (as is typical of people removed from the field).

It reminds me of the legions of people in 1980 saying things like, “The desktop PC can never do what mainframes do, ever!” I remember reading those articles, even though the revisionist history is that they were never written.

And of course only a few years later desktop PCs were doing just that act of replacing, and more.

Most people have no idea just how quickly robotics technology and practical AI is advancing. Yes, Roger Smith was wrong and venal and stupid. But that doesn’t mean that automation isn’t getting easier and cheaper all the time.

Even in my field, things that I used to do only a few years ago manually of necessity are completely automated now. Those jobs just don’t exist any more. They will never come back.

This is happening and will continue to happen to other areas of the economy. Think fast food workers aren’t paid much now? Wait thirty years and here’s how much they’ll be paid: nothing. Because there won’t be any.

This switch to robotics and ever-increasing automation will take most people – like the writer of the piece to which I linked – by complete surprise even though the signs are obvious.

Note that I am not arguing that this is a good thing or even a bad thing. In this piece I hold no value judgment about it whatsoever. I am merely stating that no matter what anyone thinks, it is inevitable.